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Readers on Making Money With Vista and Other Stuff

We didn't get tons of responses to our query as to whether you're making much money off the much-maligned, but apparently not totally disastrous, Vista operating system, but we did get a few interesting thoughts. These probably won't go over too well in Redmond, but here they are.

Nat starts us off:

"I've been making a little money with Vista. I have removed and replaced it with XP a few times and charged my customers for the labor, and I made a little money on the sell of the XP replacement. I still personally don't like it; the new Windows Explorer is awful and the Control Panel items are all mixed up now."

So...not a very strong endorsement there. Let's see if AJ is having better luck:

"The only IT change I'm starting to see at my large clients is a new requirement to purchase Dells instead of the other approved brands when desktops are to be rotated out. Dell has offered them XP instead of Vista."

Ouch. So, from what we're hearing (and we've talked to a few folks outside of the newsletter world who have said the same thing), Vista isn't doing much for partners' bottom lines. That's a shame -- but it's not exactly a surprise.

If you are making money with Vista -- or if you want to complain about how useless it is for you -- I'd still love to hear from you on this topic at [email protected].

We have one more thought this week, this one from frequent contributor Rick, who notes that security problems for open source applications (as opposed to just for Windows and Microsoft apps) appear to be a thing of the present and not just of the future:

"As a network admin I'm constantly watching the security alerts for issues found in the software that my company uses. One of the most common alerts that I'm sure many people watch is from US-CERT Security Bulletins.

"The new twist is that I haven't seen Microsoft listed the past three or four times! They used to be always in the high-risk section. Whenever they were listed only in the medium category, it was considered a win for Microsoft. Now they don't even show up in the low-risk section.

"What I do see is a lot of software based on PHP and other open source stuff. I guess this is the wave of the future."

Apparently so, Rick, as well as the wave of the present. As we've said here before, welcome to the big time, Linux.

Have any other thoughts to share? I'm always here at [email protected], and I really do read every e-mail I get, even if I sadly don't have time to respond to most of them anymore. Also, don't forget that the blog site is always there for comments, fights and other rancor. And have a great weekend.

Posted by Lee Pender on 06/01/2007 at 1:20 PM


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